Features - Enterprise Data Insights:

INDUSTRY ANALYST TAKES DEEPER LOOK AT CIM, SMI-S STANDARDS

Data Mobility Group, a respected storage industry research firm, and AppIQ Inc, a leading provider of software that enables data storage to be managed as an IT utility, announced the availability of a white paper that helps administrators evaluate storage devices and management applications implemented using the Common Information Model (CIM) and Storage Management Initiative Specification (SMI-S) industry standards. Entitled "Storage Management and the Continued Importance of CIM," the paper discusses the implementations of SMI-S by both hardware and software vendors, and comes at a time when the majority of storage administrators are evaluating solutions for standards compliance.

The demand for SMI-S compliant devices and management applications is on the rise. Storage administrators are beginning to understand the value of open standards, which allow for best-of-breed storage devices and management applications to be easily integrated into existing IT infrastructures.

"There is no question that storage administrators are requiring SMI-S compliant devices and management applications as they understand the benefits that the standard will bring," said John Webster, senior analyst, partner and founder of Data Mobility Group. "The next step will be in understanding the ways vendors are implementing the standard and how they can reap the benefits today."

As a backdrop for the discussion on CIM-built solutions, the white paper also reviews the basics of SMI-S, the vendor-neutral application programming interface (API) based on CIM that provides "an open, and industry-accepted, way of integrating storage devices with storage management applications, as well as storage management applications with each other."

"The real-time enterprise needs the freedom to leverage best-of-breed storage technologies to keep pace with changing business requirements," said Tom Rose, vice president of marketing at AppIQ. "That's why we built our award-winning SAN management and SRM software on CIM and SMI-S. By leveraging these standards, AppIQ StorageAuthority Suite provides a single, consistent interface to monitor, report on, and provision the broad range of heterogeneous applications, servers and storage devices in today's data centers, enabling customers to confidently scale their storage environments, reduce operational costs, and improve application availability and quality of service."